Top 10: Modern Renaissance Men

There's a reason we use the term "Renaissance men" to describe guys who are basically multidimensional geniuses, guys who excel remarkably in completely separate fields. We do have synonyms like "polymath" and "homo universalis," but "Renaissance man" best captures that this absurd diversity of talent is the product of a bygone era. Two of the names that pop up almost immediately are Ben Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, and those two nicely bookend the period during which most of these guys lived. These two were also intellectual superheroes: both were inventors, writers and scientists in different fields. While Franklin was a political heavyweight and major statesman, da Vinci, instead, went into pretty much every other discipline imaginable (painting, architecture, sculpting, and music, to name a few).

We may not have da Vinci-level polymaths anymore -- we specialize, not diversify -- but we do have a small group of unheralded guys, often not famous outside of the sciences, whose talent can't be contained by one field. Some are famous; many are physicists; one is a rock god; an one has been in outer space.